Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education

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Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education

On the ground floor of a converted, Victorian-era cinema in Coventry, England, Jonathan Worth delivers a world-class photography lecture anyone can attend at any time, from anywhere, for free.

The green-tiled building stands on an otherwise typical city center street. From here, alongside teaching assistant Matt Johnston and boss Jonathan Shaw, Worth corals 28 attending students in addition to the few thousand clocking-in from across the globe.

The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class's RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions. Worth's Fall course attracted over 10,000 visitors to its website from 1,632 cities in 107 countries and the Winter course is available as an iPhone App. Lectures from the course have been downloaded thousands of times on iTunes.

Thanks to some savvy networking, the class also gives access to some big names. The crowd-sourced list of photo books, with submissions from bandstand photographers Alec Soth, Gilles Peress, Joel Meyerowitz, Todd Hido and others had over 100,000 page views.

“I think Jonathan’s course experiments are fantastic,” says Professor David Campbell, member of the Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. “He is probably the most creative teacher I know.”

After nearly 15 years as a successful commercial photographer specializing in portraiture (he’s photographed celebrities like Alan Moore, Colin Firth and Brett Easton-Ellis), Jonathan Worth gave up the advertising and editorial jobs, left New York, and returned to his native England to take up a part-time teaching gig at Coventry University.

If he was going to have to learn about new media economics just to survive as a photographer, he thought, others should join him for the ride.

Worth's two experimental classes Photography and Narrative (#PHONAR) and Picturing the Body (#PICBOD) are free, online undergraduate curricula and they're entirely open. Both courses directly address the radical transformations in the media economy. For example, the course catalog reads: The role of photographer (mode of information) as supplier to old media (mode of distribution) no longer exists - that link has been broken. We recognise [sic] instead the need to redefine the role of the contemporary photographer as publisher.

“There aren't many university courses that place front and center the fact that the student's vocation is close to being history!” says Worth.

Alan Moore photographed in his home city of Northampton,UK.

Jonathan Worth

By advocating for new learning strategies and distribution methods, Worth has disturbed the academic apple-cart. He's also become a hub for online photography and media education.

“I curate a journey through a structure of learning, providing contextual links between specialist contributors," says Worth. "Each year the journey is different (and relevant), and each year it accrues a long tail of content.”

Thanks to Worth's considerable Rolodex, students have benefited from the input of internationally acclaimed critic Fred Ritchin, director of VII Photo Stephen Mayes, designer Wayne Ford and head of London's Foto8 Jon Levy. (Disclosure: The author was also a guest lecturer for both classes.)

The open approach has dispersed content far beyond the classroom. And because of this, Worth was made a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) and recently acted as poster-boy for the UK launch of Creative Commons initiative The Power of Open.

The classes are centered around experimentation with - and use of - social media tools, because Worth believes them essential to his students’ future career. In the internet age, the photographer is not only a producer, they are also distributor and publisher. Getting the University to adopt services like Flickr, Soundcloud, Audioboo, Twitter and Google Docs was essential to eliminate any barriers to entry, but it was a difficult battle to wage.

"In the UK, as a result of the Conservative-led government's insistence that students are consumers, universities are under massive pressure,” says Campbell. “That ideological program is pushing an out-moded model of learning, where more time in the classroom listening to a teacher's broadcast is the goal. Thinking creatively about teaching demands an emphasis on engagement. Leveraging social media technologies to extend learning beyond the classroom is central to engagement."

In both traditional and new-guard forms, online educational is reaching a disruptive level of popularity. Harvard, Yale and Bard have recently launched the Floating University. Bill Gates is championing the Kahn Academy, a one-man enterprise that teaches an array of subjects by way of 12-minute YouTube videos.

“I think we're heading towards a place where we'll no longer be able to charge for content,” says Worth. “And that scares the shit out of academic institutions.”

Worth uses Twitter as “a listening device” and a means “to tune the network.” Using hashtags, students in the Coventry can as easily share notes with classmates as they can students following the class from Dehli or Philadelphia.

Students of the seminars have gone on to work with photographers including Nick Knight, Mario Testino, Jeff Brouws and Steve Pyke. Others are in conversation with Marcus Bleasdale, Chris Floyd and Sean O'Hagan. One student is now an intern with Annie Liebovitz.

“Although some of this would still have happened without the open classes, I definitely think the opportunities have come about much quicker. Name me another class in any subject with similar modest resources, which has made a comparable impact - anywhere, any when.”

Worth is gearing up for the next academic year; the networks continues to tune, the engagement continues to rumble. “There’s opportunities with this everywhere I look,” he says.